Jorge Jesus has told Portuguese broadcaster Canal 11 that he tried to talk Cristiano Ronaldo out of walking away from the national team, speaking openly for the first time about a breakup he plainly did not want.

“I asked him to continue with me because I needed him by my side, but I have to accept his decision,” Jesus told World Soccer Talk’s cited Canal 11 interview.

The conversation, by his own account, had happened before he picked his first Portugal squad. Ronaldo, 41, posted his retirement video on Thursday 5 November, saying his journey with the national team had reached its end after 23 years, 234 caps and 146 goals.

The coach’s photograph and the lawyer’s Olympus

Jesus also revealed that he had hung a large picture of Ronaldo in the national team’s auditorium so young players could look up to him every day, describing the forward in tribute terms as a reference point for Portuguese youth, according to World Soccer Talk.

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The register inside his own legal team was anything but tribute. Weeks before the retirement, Jesus’s lawyer Luis Miguel Henrique had resigned from his column at Record, the sports daily published by Medialivre, a company in which Ronaldo holds a roughly 30 percent stake through Expressão Livre.

In the farewell column, as reported by Goal, Henrique wrote that Ronaldo was ruining the public’s ability to remember the good he had given Portuguese football through his conduct and his obsession with certain numbers.

He closed with a line that still hangs over the whole affair.

“This is the fate of gods and tyrants. They end up alone on Mount Olympus, surrounded by mirrors.”

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Henrique framed his resignation as a matter of independence: he could not keep writing for a newspaper tied to a figure he was simultaneously criticising while representing his coach.

The autumn that split them

The crack opened across Portugal’s Nations League window. Ronaldo was an unused substitute against Norway on 27 September. He then walked out of the national team camp on 30 September after learning he would not start against Denmark the following day.

The Portuguese Football Federation suspended him for 30 days and fined him €255, according to Sky Sports.

Portugal played on without him. On 4 October, they beat Norway 2-1, Gonçalo Ramos scoring the winner, to clinch their Nations League quarter-final place in his absence.

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What Jesus faces now

The suspension has long since expired, and the career it was meant to shape has ended on the player’s terms, not the federation’s.

Jesus heads into Portugal’s November international window for the first time without the forward he said he had wanted by his side, with Gonçalo Ramos as the de facto starting striker Henrique had already predicted in that Record farewell column.

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